The man who loathed emoticons – especially :)) as it reminded him of his double chin

Paul O’Rourke, the narrator of Joshua Ferris’s third novel, is a dentist who spends his days staring into the murky recesses of his patients’ mouths. Despite encouraging them to floss, he is himself a man of curiously ingrained habits. Averse to the digital age and oddly superstitious, he stockpiles VHS recorders and watches the Boston Red Sox with a plate of bland chicken and rice, always careful to avert his eyes from the sixth innings. His small Park Avenue staff implore him to get with the times and develop a website for the practice; but Paul is a Luddite with no interest in kowtowing to a culture of smartphones and over-sharing. So when a well-produced website mysteriously appears and tweets under his name, he is understandably perturbed.

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An avowed atheist, Paul is dismissive of church, which he sees merely as ‘a place to be bored in’; but he is nevertheless drawn to certain religious beliefs, especially those of his ex-girlfriends. His aptly named college sweetheart, Sammy Santacroce, came from a Catholic family; and Catholics, who according to Paul ‘speak, like baseball players, in the coded language of gesture’, continue to hold a fascination for him. More attractive still is Judaisim, and the identity it confers on even its non-believers — like on Connie, another ex, whom he employs as his receptionist.

Yet the Paul O’Rourke commenting with impunity on a variety of websites appears to be deeply steeped in religion and to have no difficulty in deploying the whole range of Old Testament bombast — albeit to make declarations doubting the existence of God. Controversy threatens as this online Paul recounts the contested tribal history of the Israelites and the Amalekites, with damaging insinuations of anti-Semitism. The real Paul’s attempts to distance himself are hampered by the intimate details of his own life that these posts reveal.